Adrenochrome

I have had several friends tell me how much they have enjoyed the new movie Sound of Freedom. I have read that it is a platform for various conspiracy theories and will not watch it myself based on what I know about it. I think that it is dangerous and promotes outlandish propaganda.

...the movie is also being criticized as a vehicle for conspiracy theories and misleading depictions of human trafficking — landing it in the middle of the country's politically polarized culture wars.

The film, based on a real-life, controversial anti-trafficking activist, is being heavily promoted in conservative media. Former President Donald Trump is hosting a screening on Wednesday at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J .

A big part of its success is an appeal from its star, Jim Caviezel, who comes on screen at the end urging viewers to buy more tickets so other people can see it and help end child trafficking. It's a model distributor Angel Studios calls "pay it forward."

Caviezel, who previously played Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, is also drawing attention to the film in other ways. For years, he's been a prominent promoter of the false, violent QAnon conspiracy theory — specifically, the baseless claim that an international cabal of elites is abusing and killing children to extract a substance called adrenochrome.

Ah, adrenochrome. The magical substance that liberal elites and globalists (you know who they are) extract from unsuspecting children that wander into the wrong pizza parlor. 

I admit to not knowing too much about the substance, having missed my shift at Dominos apparently and decided to do some more research. Here is some info, from Wikipedia:

Adrenochrome is a chemical compound produced by the oxidation of adrenaline (epinephrine). It was the subject of limited research from the 1950s through to the 1970s as a potential cause of schizophrenia. While it has no current medical application, the related derivative compound, carbazochrome, is a hemostatic medication. Despite this compound's name, it is unrelated to the element chromium; instead, the ‑chrome suffix indicates a relationship to color, as pure adrenochrome is deep violet.[1]

In his 1954 book The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley mentioned the discovery and the alleged effects of adrenochrome which he likened to the symptoms of mescaline intoxication, although he had never consumed it.[15]

Anthony Burgess mentions adrenochrome as "drencrom" at the beginning of his 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. The protagonist and his friends are drinking drug-laced milk: "They had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches [...]"[15]

Hunter S. Thompson mentioned adrenochrome in his 1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.[16] This is the likely origin of current myths surrounding this compound, because a character states that "There's only one source for this stuff ... the adrenaline glands from a living human body. It's no good if you get it out of a corpse." The adrenochrome scene also appears in the novel's film adaptation.[15] In the DVD commentary, director Terry Gilliam admits that his and Thompson's portrayal is a fictional exaggeration. Gilliam insists that the drug is entirely fictional and seems unaware of the existence of a substance with the same name. Hunter S. Thompson also mentions adrenochrome in his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. In the footnotes in chapter April, page 140, he says: "It was sometime after midnight in a ratty hotel room and my memory of the conversation is hazy, due to massive ingestion of booze, fatback, and forty cc's of adrenochrome."

Adrenochrome is a component of several far right conspiracy theories, such as QAnon and Pizzagate,[17][18][19] with the chemical helping the theories play a similar role to earlier blood libel and Satanic ritual abuse stories.[20] According to QAnon, which has incorporated and expanded Pizzagate's claims about child sex abuse rings, a cabal of Satanists rapes and murders children, using the adrenochrome they "harvest" from their victims' blood as a drug[21][22] or as an elixir of youth.[23] In reality, adrenochrome is synthesized, solely for research purposes, by biotechnology companies.[24][25][26]

When I read this I immediately hearkened back to the old blood libel that was promoted by the fake document called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You know, how Jews steal Christian children and drain their blood to make matzoh.

In 1903, portions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were serialized in a Russian newspaper, Znamya (The Banner). The version of the Protocols that has endured and has been translated into dozens of languages, however, was first published in Russia in 1905 as an appendix to The Great in the Small: The Coming of the Anti-Christ and the Rule of Satan on Earth, by Russian writer and mystic Sergei Nilus.

Although the exact origin of the Protocols is unknown, its intent was to portray Jews as conspirators against the state. In 24 chapters, or protocols, allegedly minutes from meetings of Jewish leaders, the Protocols "describes" the "secret plans" of Jews to rule the world by manipulating the economy, controlling the media, and fostering religious conflict.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, anti-Bolshevik émigrés brought the Protocols to the West. Soon after, editions circulated across Europe, the United States, South America, and Japan. An Arabic translation first appeared in the 1920s.

Beginning in 1920, auto magnate Henry Ford's newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, published a series of articles based in part on the Protocols. The International Jew, the book that included this series, was translated into at least 16 languages. Both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, later head of the propaganda ministry, praised Ford and The International Jew.

It turned out that the Protocols were copied in large part from a French political satire that never mentioned Jews—Maurice Joly's Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864). But no matter, they spread like wildfire.

The protocols were not the first that mentioned Jews sacrificing children for their nefarious rituals, it goes back much farther in time. See Q Anon, blood libel and the Satanic panic.

In the case of William of Norwich—a young boy found dead in a wood in England, in the year 1144—his premature demise was transformed, ex post facto, into a ritual supposedly performed by Jews explicitly to mock the Passion of the Christ. In this lurid account of ritual desecration, the Jews scourged the boy, anointed him with thorns, lanced him in the side as Christ had been lanced, and staunched the flow of blood with boiling water. All this was meant to consecrate the celebration of Passover. William’s hagiographer, the monk Thomas of Monmouth, laid out this unsubstantiated account in excruciating detail, leading to the canonization of the dead boy. Like mushrooms after rain, accounts of miracles arose around his tomb.

I guess these sorts of tales surface with regularity every hundred years or so.

Over the centuries, the accusation of ritual murder became more baroque and more codified. By 1235, in France, the desecration of Christian Easter that formed the backbone of these putative Passover celebrations had expanded to include consumption of the blood of children. This was “in accordance with a Jewish custom to celebrate communion on Easter Sunday with the blood of Christian children,” writes the historian Joshua Trachtenberg in his seminal 1943 study, The Devil and the Jews. If sacramental wine became the blood of Christian children, an evil kind of transubstantiation occurred. Eventually the theory evolved to include the idea that Jews mixed Christian blood in their Passover bread.

The Q Anon people have put their own special spin on things:

QAnon contains significant elements of antisemitism (Q has fixated on the Rothschilds and George Soros as crucial sponsors and members of the cabal) and a furious racism (Q adherents blame wildfires on the Black Lives Matter movement and postulate that Black activists confer with demons). The fixation on Soros—an echo of mainstream Republican claims that the Hungarian Jew is the potential orchestrator of a “coup” and a perennial funder of political opposition—is particularly hysterical and violent. Q himself has referenced Soros several times as the financial font funding “domestic terrorism.”

One widespread online rumor held that Anthony Weiner had a secret video on his laptop of a Satanic ritual showing Hillary Clinton mutilating a girl with the aid of Huma Abedin, drinking the girl’s blood while wearing masks made of the skin of her face. In the QAnon imagination, Democrats and celebrities commingle in orgies of bloodlust, while demons of the figurative and literal variety cavort their way to supreme intoxication.

I know that this stuff is complete hogwash. If you buy in, I would say that we don't have a lot to talk about. I think I will give the movie a pass.